How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (R)

Based on Toby Youngs tome about his spectacular fuck-ups and flame-out at Vanity Fair, Robert Weides big-screen version is sitcom-drab. Simon Pegg plays Young, reducing the writerin the book version, a narcissistic twat who aspired to be Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, sans the looks or talentto nothing more than a barely functioning idiot, a cretin clad in a Young, Dumb and Full of Come T-shirt whose loutishness is outmatched only by his inability to function as a human being. Worse, the story's been turned into a romantic comedy, in which Simon woos his considerably smarter though no less self-absorbed superior, Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst), whos fucking an editor (Danny Huston) who seems to be speaking in four different accents at once, none of them quite of the English variety. It plays like a made-for-CBS redo of The Devil Wears Prada, which was likewise set at a Manhattan glossy, but also happened to contain some of the most insightful observations about the perils of workplace success.